On Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying”: A Discourse on the Perceptions of Art and Reality Anonymous College

In “The Decay of Lying”, written in 1891, Oscar Wilde promotes his views of Romanticism over Realism through Socratic-dialogue between the speakers Vivian and Cyril. In part of the essay, Wilde opposes Plato’s views that are found in chapter ten of The Republic by refuting Plato’s theory of the Forms and that art distracts one from attaining true philosophical fulfillment. While Plato states that art morally degrades one’s character through appealing to their lowest faculties (that of emotions), Wilde argues that art is what gives nature meaning and makes it exist as something worth admiring. Wilde states that art is not a mirror, rather a veil that conceals the grotesque and flirts with the aesthetics that humans admire. Wilde defends that art is the maker of our world and the lens through which humans give it meaning.

Wilde states that: “[Art] is a veil, rather than a mirror” (9) and that it only shows what we want to see. Art conceals what we do not want to see and creates illusions, ideas that do not yet exist but that add to our sense of beauty. This opposes Plato’s view of art, which is that art corrupts the soul: “Tell me now about the painter. Do you think he tries to imitate the object in nature or the works of the...